Archiv für den Monat: April 2016

Waterways and dams are omnipresent in Holland, and their role for the economy in general (from Rotterdam to the inland) and especially tourism (the canals of Amsterdam) is obvious. While travelling by bus to the town of Zierikzee on one of the islands in Zeeland, I was looking at more water and dikes and polders. It reminded me of colonies in the sense of colere, to cultivate, and here also of managing land and water. According to the exhibition in the Stadhuismuseum (www.stadhuismuseum.nl), this process began in the early middle ages. It is explained in detail in Han Meyer’s study of „De staat van de delta. Waterwerken, stadsontwikkeling en natievorming in Nederland“ (Nijmegen: Vantilt 2016).

How did this delta experience, via the politics of the chambers of the Dutch East India company, influence colonisation in the Moluccas? On Ambon and Banda, for example, there were no landscapes with zoet en zout, sweet and salty water and biotopes on the same scale. Rumphius the natural scholar wrote about trees in abundance, hills, and mountains. If there was a direct transfer, apart from the knowledge system of navigation and shipping, it must have been in the engineering of projects and the organisation of labour. Meyer writes about the islands of Southern Holland and Zeeland in the 16th century especially: „The diking and impoldering has for a great deal been realized by private initiatives.“ On the Northern islands in the delta, developers from Holland
„used a standardized concept: apart from a ring dike, the new polders were equipped with a drainage system, a town (stedelijke neerzetting), and a port. The town provided accommodation for agricultural workers, but also shops, a blacksmith, a townhall, a church, and a port.“ (p. 39 and 41 respectively, my translation) Merchants and company officials, then, might have adapted an established business model when planning forts and plantations on the Moluccas – an issue I will explore further during my next phase of archival research.

Starting from G. Rumphius' "Het Amboinsche Kruid-Boek", written on Ambon in the late 1600s and published in Amsterdam from 1741 onwards - how to research historical plants, analyze botanical material culture, and write about the coloniality of a botanical regime?